Communications transferred from an access node of a Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless communication network are divided into frames, which are in turn divided into subframes. Control channels of the LTE access node are transferred at the beginning of each subframe. Specifically, the beginning of each subframe is divided into a plurality of control channel elements with each control channel using a portion of those elements.
One of the control channels discussed above is a Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH). The PDCCH, in part, is configured to transfer uplink grants to wireless devices to allow traffic channel access to the LTE network. A wireless device will request a traffic channel for the access node and then monitor information on the PDCCH for an uplink grant that informs the wireless device of uplink resources allocated to the wireless device in response to the request. The wireless device then uses the uplink resources identified in that uplink grant to transfer communications to the access node. The message on the PDCCH that includes the uplink grants is referred to as a random access response (RAR) message. The RAR message itself uses a certain number of the CCEs allocated to the PDCCH in order to transfer the uplink grants. The number of CCEs used for the RAR is constant and does not change.